Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal says that he will never sell
London’s Savoy hotel, which he co-owns with Lloyds Banking Group.

Prince Alwaleed is worth £11.5bn according to Forbes and is one of the world’s wealthiest hotel investors with a portfolio which also includes New York’s Plaza and the George V in Paris.

“I would never sell the George V, the Savoy and the Plaza,” Prince Alwaleed told The Sunday Telegraph.

He describes his flagship hotels as “one of a kind, irreplaceable ones” and said that the Savoy was his crown jewel in the UK. Prince Alwaleed’s Kingdom Holdings investment company bought the hotel with HBOS – now part of Lloyds – in 2005 for £230m and they each own a 50pc stake. It closed in December 2007 for a renovation which at £220m cost almost as much as the hotel itself.

“The Savoy has a strong history in London and the UK yet it went astray before we bought it,” he said. “It degraded completely and the service became bad.”

The renovation took nearly three years and it has recently been reported that pension funds and sovereign wealth investors are looking to support a “routine” refinancing of the hotel’s £400m debt.

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In just over 30 years Prince Alwaleed has built his fortune by buying shares in companies with strong global brands but depressed share prices. As markets have recovered, Prince Alwaleed’s wealth has soared. Kingdom Holdings has bought stakes in, among others, Citigroup, Canary Wharf, Disney and Apple.

“We have strategic hotels that we will keep and many others that we buy, renovate, brand as one of our brands and then sell. So hotels and hotel real estate are a very big component of our holdings.”

The hotel assets range from a 33.3pc stake in three to four-star chain Mövenpick to 35pc of the five-star Fairmont Raffles group which also owns Swissôtel. Kingdom’s hotel holdings also include a 47.5pc stake in luxury hotel leader, Four Seasons.

In April, Kingdom rebuffed a £383m offer for the New York Plaza from Indian conglomerate Sahara, which owns London’s Grosvenor House hotel. Kingdom owns 50pc of the Plaza with the remainder held by Israel’s El-Ad real estate group.

Prince Alwaleed said: “Our partner in the Plaza wants to sell, but we told him that he can sell alone. We are not selling. If we sell, this means we will not only lose the hotel, we will also lose money.”

Prince Alwaleed added: “When we are in a down cycle, like we were some years ago, some five-star hotels get hit more and those that are in the four-star range like Mövenpick and Swissotel do better. When the economies of the world begin picking up, the luxurious hotels like the Four Seasons, the Raffles and the Fairmonts do better”.

He said things were looking up for hospitality. “We are already seeing major pick-up in the world economies,” he said. “We are seeing a lot of pick-up in Europe, the United States and the Far East.”

Factbox: Prince Alwaleed

• Family: Grandson of founder and first ruler of Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz Alsaud

• Born: Riyadh, 1955

• Assets: stake in global financial group. Owns George V hotel in Paris, New York Plaza and London’s Savoy

• Other investments: stakes in News Corp, Time Warner, Disney and Apple. Portfolio includes Saks Inc, parent of upmarket US department store